The 1940 census data is available online. You can find an intriguing 1937 map of Dryden "prepared by the technical staff of the Tompkins County Development Association", and lots of data on Dryden individuals as well in the census schedules....
The Federal Courts have had enough of Albany's delay on Congressional lines, and ordered the legislature to hand over the maps. You can see the docket for the case (missing the Assembly maps?) and a complete set of maps submitted....
Now I'm starting to wonder if anything at all in the Geology chapter (4.2MB PDF) of the Revised Draft SGEIS on the Oil, Gas and Solution Mining Regulatory Program can be trusted. I posted a while ago about the 'fairway'...
Much to my surprise, I got a couple of questions over the weekend about the redistricting for the Tompkins County Legislature. I'm guessing they both originated with this article in the Ithaca Journal. As that article notes, the Independent Redistricting...
The last time I wrote about, this, I was pointing to what looked like a single small faulted area in Dryden along the Caroline town line. Faults in Tompkins County. That came from Figure 4.13 in the Geology section of...
Yes, I've been kind of focused on this coming Tuesday, but not everyone is. The Tompkins County Independent Redistricting Commission had built sixteen maps of possible new districts for 2013, but they've narrowed it down to four. One has 15...
Update: I'm now pretty sure there's more than the DEC reports to this story. Okay, okay, it's hard to imagine that Dryden has faults. However, the Geology section of the hydrofracking SGEIS (4.2 MB PDF) includes Figure 4.13, a map...
I mentioned earlier that Dryden is at "an interesting geological location", but hadn't gone into much depth about why. The first half of the geological section of the New York State draft SGEIS (4.2MB PDF) explores the question of where...
I didn't manage to get to it, but the the Tompkins County Council of Governments Task Force on Gas Drilling presented "Looking Down From Above: What Gas Drilling Sites Might Look Like in the Town of Dryden" on Tuesday. Fortunately,...
If your first response to the news that the state will be allowing hydrofracking around here is "what does this mean for me?", you're not at all alone. Between the patchwork parcel-by-parcel of gas leasing and the state's compulsory integration...
Bad maps often explain bad decision-making, but maybe we can stop that early. Dryden Daily KAZ looks at New York State's rose-colored take on broadband availability. I seem to get about a quarter of what the state thinks Time-Warner provides...
Russ Nelson sent me aerial photos Cornell put on line a while ago, but I didn't figure out that you could zoom in on them until last night. Once I did that, I was just plain amazed. The easiest place...
There's a meeting at the Varna Community Center tonight to discuss a "Master Plan for Varna," but there's kind of a challenge in that very idea. Varna is a hamlet, and hamlets in this part of New York State are...
How many cars go by every day? Well, New York State seems to think about 7,383 pass my house each day. It could be worse - the 13/366 overlap has 18126, and Route 13 between there and the Village of...
The Ithaca Journal's news coverage keeps shrinking, and the paper is looking more and more like a general Upstate paper with stories of local interest. There are still lots of interesting bits, but overall I find it less compelling every...
While I've been marveling at the awfulness of the broad hamlet zoning proposed in the second draft of the law, Jim Skaley's been developing a proposal that does more than say "revert back to the first draft." Skaley saw the...
Not exactly explained, no, but at least you can see how strange local zip code boundaries are. I grew up in Corning, which was 14830. Painted Post was 14870, Bath 14810, and Hammondsport 14840. That sort of made sense, until...
I'm not yet sure how much of the Town they visited, but Google Maps seems to have added street views of a variety of places. The street views are pretty far out of sync with the satellite views, though -...
Talk about gas drilling is often pretty abstract. Signing a lease doesn't put a sign on the land saying "this land leased for gas drilling", and figuring out what has been leased can mean a long trip through stacks of...
NYCO's Blog highlighted a map showing which school districts face the ugly combination of above average tax rates and lower spending per student. The map comes from the Midstate School Finance Consortium, which is pushing the state for fairer and...
Earlier this morning I noted the work of the Ithaca Tompkins County Transportation Council (ITCTC) on a draft map for bicyclists indicating the suitability of various roads in the county for bicycling. Here's a closer view of the portion of...
The Town Board will soon be evaluating the prospects for a water district along Ellis Hollow Road (where wells have been having problems) and for a water and sewer district near Pinckney Road, where it would serve businesses between there...
I mentioned earlier that I was working on permaculture design for my house and its surrounding area. A key part of that is planning, and I've hired Joshua Dolan to help with that and more. To get started, he and...
There's a lot of discussion of soil types at Town Hall. Soil types affect everything from agriculture to septic tank placement to erosion and runoff. The Town of Dryden Comprehensive Plan includes Map 4-1, Natural Constraints to Development (1.9MB PDF),...
If anyone's curious how I made the presidential election and voter registration maps of Tompkins County, and doesn't mind a walk through some technical details, my employer's published Hacking Election Maps with XML and MapServer, which explains how I created...
After last night's 2004 presidential voting maps, I thought I'd play with the voter registration data and see what kind of perspective that gives on the politics of the county. As I did with the presidential data, I stripped it...
Two books I edited on mapping topics - Mapping Hacks and Web Mapping Illustrated - are coming out next month, so I've been wanting to play with maps. By combining district-by-district election data for the 2004 presidential race, the 2002...
Cornell's proposed windmills on Mount Pleasant, near the WHCU radio tower, encountered a lot of opposition last week. I missed the informational meeting at the Varna Community Center, so I went to the Environmental Management Council meeting last Wednesday instead....
I've been meaning to link to Google Maps for a while, though I've been sticking to MapQuest out of habit. Google's posted satellite photos now in addition to their regular maps, as you can see at this link to the...
The 1996 fire coverage map for Dryden (the last one compiled, apparently still in use by 911) turned up a few months ago, and I've finally gotten around to scanning it. If you want to see a larger (32x32 inches...
I mentioned in an earlier story that the Town Board decided to focus discussion of a new Town Hall on the existing site. Since then, I've gotten some of the photos discussed at the meeting, of the existing site and...
The other day I noticed concrete markers along the south side of Route 13. I'd driven by them for years without seeing them, but suddenly they seemed to be everywhere. Monuments at Ringwood Road and Route 13 The survey map...
The Ithaca Journal's editorial today examines the annual assessment process. This process has come under fire lately, largely because taxes and assessments have risen at the same time. I think the Journal is right that annual assessment and a central...
We'll see what the Town Planning Board has to say about Etna's future tonight, but here's a rich description of its past from George Goodrich. Etna was a very busy place, and this entry is considerably longer than the one...
Since the Town Planning Board will be looking at Varna's future tonight, it seemed like an appropriate day to post George Goodrich's history of its past. (I'm still typing in Etna's chapter.) In a first, I've scanned in the pictures...
The Verizon Wireless booth at the Pyramid Mall used to have a poster-sized map of their coverage areas. Of course, I signed up with them (or Frontier, anyway) when I lived in a place with coverage, and moved here, which...
Whenever I look at a map of Tompkins County, I look for the distinctively-shaped intersection of Routes 13 and 366. Even if a map doesn't have road labels, it stands out pretty clearly. It wasn't always that way, however -...
I made it to last night's informational meeting on the Town's Draft Comprehensive Plan, held at the Dryden Town Hall. (The hearing on annexation was at the Village Hall, at the same time, and there was a bit of confusion.)...
Before tonight's informational meeting on the Draft Comprehensive Plan, I asked George Frantz, the planner, why the GIS versions of the maps weren't available. He said he's not allowed to redistribute maps made by Tompkins County. I said a lot...
Despite my sniffling, sneezing, and coughing, I've been enjoying something new I got for work - Manifold GIS software. It's a map viewing and creation tool that lets me get right into the map data published by people like the...
The Town website now hosts the 2003 Draft Comprehensive Plan. This is a fascinating document with lots of pieces, but I'll be a while digesting before I comment on it in depth. The draft (without maps) is 2.4MB long, so...
While looking through the Cornell Plantations Path Guide, I noticed the Cayuga Trails Club's 1971 Cayuga Trail map in the back. Though it clearly wasn't the focus on the map, two small labels stood out: "Ellis Hollow Rd. NY 393"...
I've always been fond of maps, and can happily sit around reading them for hours. I just stumbled on the property tax maps for Dryden. My own house is at the far left of Map 52. If you know your...
I live at 1259 Dryden Road, Ithaca, NY 14850. Does that address say Ithaca, when this blog is about Dryden? It sure does. The house is in the Town of Dryden, but is just barely in the Ithaca zip code,...